Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya to read at Hallwalls as a BABEL EXTRA event
Talking Leaves…Books, in collaboration with the Just Buffalo Literary Center and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, is pleased to announce that Indian novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya is coming to Buffalo to read from and discuss his new novel, The Storyteller of Marrakesh (W.W. Norton), in a special BABEL EXTRA event, on Thursday, February 3, at 7 pm in the Cinema at Hallwalls. This event is free and open to the public (a Babel subscription is not required). Copies of the new book, the first in a set which take place in the Middle East and that attempt bring Western readers a more complete and thorough understanding of Islamic cultures while exploring the nature of story and storytelling, will be available for purchase.
The Jemaa el Fna, Marrakesh’s legendary central square, is the seat of an ancient storytelling tradition. Hassan, the master of this tradition, is renowned as THE STORYTELLER OF MARRAKESH, a mantle he inherited from his father. When two young foreigners go missing from the Jemaa, Hassan invites his audience to contribute to piecing together the story of what might have happened to them. The mystery of their fate—and the possible involvement of those who encountered them, including Hassan and his younger, impetuous brother Mustafa—drives the story.
What is the truth behind this mystery? Hassan’s storytelling circle attempts to answer this question, but with each new testimony the ‘facts’ become increasingly elusive. As he draws more witnesses into his circle, Hassan recollects episodes from his own past, retrieving key moments with his brothers—most especially with Mustafa, with whom he has always had a difficult relationship. As he pulls back the layers that surround his brother’s encounters with the couple, he is forced to confront the possibility of Mustafa’s involvement with the crime.
To bring to life the story of Hassan, Mustafa, the missing couple, and the Jemaa—which serves as a character in itself—Roy-Bhattacharya draws upon a tradition of oral storytelling whose last surviving practitioners hold court in the medieval Moroccan cities of Marrakesh and Fes. Founded on the purest of human emotions, love and loss, the origins of this tradition go back to the legendary qasidas of pre-Islamic Arabia, which inspired, in turn, the qissa and dastan traditions of Iran and India, the hakawatis of the Middle East, and the rawis of North Africa. Now, after a thousand years of flourishing, it is an art form in danger of extinction, a casualty of modern media. That is the beauty and paradox of this very writerly novel that uses “the blood of mystery” as the narrative vehicle to commemorate a dying oral tradition.
THE STORYTELLER OF MARRAKESH was inspired by the author’s first visit to Morocco, a visit during which he “fell passionately in love with the Maghreb.” In his words, “It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I have seldom been to a part of the world where the arts are so much in the forefront of daily existence—and it opened the doorway to my conceiving of a
cycle of novels that could articulate that passion.” The Indian-born Roy-Bhattacharya writes from the perspective of 21st century cosmopolitanism. Author of the internationally-acclaimed The Gabriel Club, set in Hungary and Austria, he is adept at narratives that thrive on complex amalgams of cultures. Yet there was something about Morocco that struck the deepest of chords with him, and as he spent more time in “this familiar but also strangely unfamiliar place”, it helped him “rediscover, in a way, the enormously rich and diverse heritage of our world, in a voyage of the senses accentuated by the wild physical beauty of the land.”
The first in a cycle of novels set in the Islamic world, THE STORYTELLER OF MARRAKESH is the wondrous and enigmatic literary child born of Roy-Bhattacharya’s love for “the universe of storytelling—a universe saturated with realities and fictions, histories and mythologies.” With lyrical writing and vividly drawn characters, THE STORYTELLER OF MARRAKESH takes the reader into its confidence with an unusual depth of intimacy. It is in equal parts a mystery, a love story, and a beautiful depiction of the bond that exists between people, irrespective of their race or religion. Like the mystical Hassan, forever searching for answers to a mystery that never seems to give back answers, Roy-Bhattacharya is a true storyteller—and one who defies easy categorizations. Perhaps the novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic put it best in writing about him: “He is my hero among my fellow writers. In a world in which an ‘identity kit’ is something like a toothbrush – that is, something one cannot do without – he has chosen the most difficult way. He has jettisoned his ‘identity kit’ in the name of freedom of literary choice, in the name of the freedom of literature.”
Maura Pellettieri, a recent graduate of UB and current employee of Talking Leaves, will open the evening with a short reading of recent prose. Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya will be visiting a Buffalo public school as part of his visit to Buffalo and the Babel series.
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was born in Jamshedpur, India, and educated in philosophy and politics. He lives in New York. His first novel, The Gabriel Club, was published in eight languages in sixteen countries.
For more information, please contact Jonathon Welch at Talking Leaves, 837.8554, or email
